There’s no confusing Ludovic Slimak for just another hotel guest. It’s a sweltering Sunday afternoon in late August and we’ve arranged to meet in the car park of a guesthouse on the outskirts of Montélimar, southeastern France.

Trine Freiesleben and Jean-Claude discussing the fingerprints and where to take OSL samples. Credit: Kristina Thomsen, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.

Sometime between 135,000-50,000 years ago, hands slick with animal blood carried more than 35 huge horned heads into a small, dark, winding cave.

Big ideas reflecting our evolution and what makes us intrinsically human.

Big ideas reflecting our evolution and what makes us intrinsically human.

If you were a Neanderthal living in harsh conditions around 50,000 years ago, your number-one concern was getting enough to eat.

The design may be simple, but a chevron pattern etched onto a deer bone more than 50,000 years ago suggests that Neanderthals had their own artistic tradition before modern humans arrived on the scene, researchers said Monday.

When Neanderthals, Denisovans and homo sapiens met one another 50,000 years ago, these archaic and modern humans not only interbred during the thousands of years in which they overlapped, but they exchanged ideas that led to a surge in creativity, according to a leading academic.

Sesame seed-size brains created from a mix of human and Neanderthal genes lived briefly in petri dishes in a University of California, San Diego laboratory, offering tantalizing clues as to how the organs have evolved over millennia.

The first Neanderthal face to emerge from time’s sarcophagus was a woman’s. As the social and liberal revolutions of 1848 began convulsing Europe, quarry workers’ rough hands pulled her from the great Rock of Gibraltar.

Their eyes met across the rugged mountain landscape of prehistoric Romania. He was a Neanderthal, and stark naked apart from a fur cape. He had good posture and pale skin, perhaps reddened slightly with sunburn. Around one of his thick, muscular biceps he wore bracelet of eagle-talons.

A quarter of the way through Kindred, I was longing to meet a Neanderthal. By the end, I realized that we had met. She is in me — or at least, in my genes.

We now know that many of us are part Neanderthal, with our genes carrying traces of past encounters between our early ancestors and the Stone Age hominins that populated Europe until around 40,000 years ago.

From skin color to immunity, human biology is linked to our archaic ancestry.

Nicola Davis speaks to Prof Jean-Jacques Hublin about new archaeological discoveries which reveal that modern humans co-existed with Neanderthals for several thousand years

https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2020/may/28/when-did-modern-humans-first-arrive-in-europe-podcast

Prof Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum, explains why some old assumptions about the intellectual capabilities of our evolutionary relatives, the Neanderthals persist today. But a body of evidence is increasingly forcing us to re-visit these old ideas.

This week Spencer and Razib discuss the Out of Africa theory, Neanderthal admixture, and The Human Revolution with Chris Stringer, Head of Human Origins Research at London's Natural History Museum.

http://insitome.libsyn.com/chris-stringer-and-the-human-revolution

When modern humans left Africa for Europe tens of thousands of years ago, they met Neanderthals and had sex with them. The evidence of those encounters remains inside most of us today; 2 to 3 percent of the DNA of non-African humans comes from Neanderthals.

The bone fragments were found in Polish cave and are believed to have belonged to a Neanderthal child who died 115,000 years ago. They may be tiny, but these bone fragments tell quite a story.

A sliver of bone from a cave in Russia is at the centre of what may be the biggest archaeological story of the year. The bone belonged to an ancient human who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. “Denny” is the only first-generation hybrid hominin ever found.